The production and sale of illegal products causes huge commercial losses. Today, the revenues generated by counterfeit products are comparable to the revenues from drug trafficking and arms sales. [Independent study: www.ntv.tv.ru, November, 2002]. Furthermore, counterfeit products, which are often made from haphazard raw materials that produce inferior and possibly dangerous products, discredit the trademark of honest manufacturers and create a potential threat to human life and health.
In recent years, the huge growth in counterfeit products has resulted in the rapid development of various technologies whose aim is to protect the reputation of the manufacturers [Pan European Forum for Auto ID Community, 2003, http://www.global-id-magazine.com/0303/250303.pdf; http://www.ean.ru]. Huge amounts of money are spent nowadays to develop unique containers and labels, bar codes, etc. with the aim of protecting the products and trademarks of honest manufacturers. However, those measures are merely external attributes that are not confirmed by their unambiguous and convincing correlation with the qualitative/quantitative characteristics of the product being protected or with the unique technology used by a specific manufacturer [Barcodes EAN/UPC: Automatic Identification Association UNISCAN: www.ean.ru; Universal Product Code (UPC) and EAN Article Numbering Code (EAN):
www.adams1.com/pub/russadam/upccode.html], and therefore they are not reliable enough protection tools.
These circumstances have focused strong interest on identification methods that permit the rapid and confident determination and documentation of whether a product belongs to a specific manufacturer based on an instrumentally controlled set of features that reflect the nature of the raw materials and production technology.
The component composition of a product is a natural set of such features. In this case, the information about the fine differences between products due to the raw materials and production technology of each specific manufacturer is carried by the unique set of trace amounts of microimpurities [Oshurko V. B., Karpyuk A. B., Melekhov A. P. Proceedings of the Third Scientific and Practical Conference, “Quality Identification and Safety of Alcoholic Products,” Pushchino, Moscow Region, 2001, p. 92]. Therefore, almost all product identification techniques are based on methods of determining and detecting trace amounts of substances (trace analysis).
The overwhelming majority of the traditional analytical technologies used to accomplish trace analysis require some preliminary preparation and/or enrichment of the sample to be analyzed [Beyermann K., Organic Trace Analysis. Georg Thieme Verlag, Stuttgart and N.Y., 1982]. This leads to inevitable experimental errors that decrease the reproducibility of the analytical results [Belyanina V. V., Petov A. P. Proceedings of the Third Scientific and Practical Conference, “Quality Identification and Safety of Alcoholic Products,” Pushchino, Moscow Region, 2001, p. 46; Sharykina A. V., Petrov A. P., Pomazanov V. V., Ibid., p. 133], which makes it impossible to make an unambiguous identification of items being compared.
Obviously, direct methods that do not require any sample preparation and eliminate or properly minimize errors and afford a high level of reproducibility of analytical results are required for the purposes of identification. The use of such methods provides for a quantitatively different level of product protection that practically excludes any unauthorized use of identification attributes of a trademark and prevents any penetration of counterfeit products into the market.